It's time for 'Let It Be' to be told

Guns N' Roses' "Chinese Democracy" may be the poster child for long-delayed projects, but some of us have been waiting even longer for something else:

A decent home-video version of the Beatles' "Let It Be."

Michael Lindsay-Hogg's 1970 documentary hasn't been in video circulation since low-quality VHS and Laserdisc versions were available in the mid-1980s. It has yet to be released on DVD. Logic would have had it come out alongside the 2003 release of "Let It Be ... Naked," the Paul McCartney-approved, stripped-down version of the "Let It Be" album. Nope.

In February 2007, Neil Aspinall, who was running the Beatles' company Apple Corps and has since died, told Fox News columnist Roger Friedman: "When we got halfway through restoring it, we looked at the outtakes and realized: This stuff is still controversial. It raised a lot of old issues."

Those issues probably were 1) The movie captures the band at its lethargic worst, and 2) McCartney comes across as a domineering showboat, lecturing George Harrison on how to play a guitar solo and often flashing his puppy-dog eyes at the camera.

Having read Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt's "Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles' 'Let It Be' Disaster,'" I'm sympathetic to Paul, who was trying to keep the band together while John Lennon was indifferent, strung out and almost surgically attached to Yoko Ono, Harrison was so frustrated that he temporarily quit and Ringo Starr was withdrawn.

But revising history is what DVD bonus footage and directors' cuts are all about. An Apple spokesman told me, "There are no immediate plans for any sort of release of that film." Representatives for McCartney and Starr confirmed this.

Arrgh. The Beatles' and McCartney's legacies can survive the exposed warts of "Let It Be." (They survived "Magical Mystery Tour," after all.) The movie features some great moments and that climactic, thrilling rooftop concert. This is rock 'n' roll history.